Sunday, June 22, 2008

Drascula isn't a Telltale game (or a game by the people who work there), but it's sort of relevant because it now can be downloaded completely for free and played in ScummVM. ScummVM was originally created to play the SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) games by LucasArts (Maniac Mansion to The Curse of Monkey Island), and many of the people working at Telltale now made those SCUMM games.

So, this post IS relevant in a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon kind of way. :) Plus, I can't help but promote a previously commercial but now freeware adventure game. :D

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

For those of you who have yet to experience the games based on Jeff Smith's Bone comics, there is now one more option for you to get the game. Both games in the series, Out From Boneville and The Great Cow Race, are now available on Steam.

The episodes can be bought individually for $8.99 each, or in a double pack for $14.99. They can also be found in the Telltale Everything Pack, which features the Bone games, both seasons of Sam and Max, and Telltale Texas Hold'em for $69.99.

Monday, June 16, 2008

I have a personal blog on Wordpress, and I wanted to try out Blogger, so I decided to make this one a little more focused. So, I decided to dedicate my blog to my favorite company, Telltale Games (and occasionally the adventure games created by these great folks when they were over at LucasArts).

Dráscula is now supported by ScummVM, a program designed to let 2D adventure games run on multiple platforms. With ScummVM, Dráscula now runs on modern versions of windows, as well as Linux, Mac OS X, and many consoles such as Dreamcast, Wii, PlayStation 2, and PlayStation Portable. For a complete list of platforms supported by ScummVM, see here.

Bone: Out From Boneville was Telltale's first adventure game. It was released on September 15, 2005. A Mac port, developed by a company called Vanbrio, was released on October 13, 2006.

Bone: Out From Boneville was Telltale's first episodic game, and was based on the comic of the same name by Jeff Smith. Phoney Bone gets the Bone cousins tossed out of town. A swarm of locusts cause the Bones to get lost in a new land.

The retail versions of Bone: Out from Boneville are out of print, but the PC version can still be purchased digitally online through Steam.

Last Life is a three part episodic adventure game based on modern adventure games such as Kentucky Route Zero and Telltale's The Walking Dead series, where a detective must investigate his own murder. It is being developed by Rocket Science Amusements and will be published by Double Fine.

Maya Nguyen, the marketing director of LZP Games explains the marketplace realities that are the company's reasoning behind the cancellation of Fuzzy & Bill as well as the ignorance of fan outcry towards the cancellation.

One of Dangeresque's remarks when you click on the paintings in his office is that "these belong in a museum! But I'm keeping 'em anyway". This is a reference to Indiana Jones saying that the cross of Coronado belongs in a museum in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. This was also used as an injoke in many LucasArts adventure games.

Loom is a LucasArts adventure game that gets rid of the typical SCUMM interface in favor of a magical staff. No items are collected and no verbs are selected. Everything is done with a combination of musical notes called drafts. Throughout the game, more complicated drafts are learned which let you do more things, and let you access new areas. Two sequels were planned but were never completed.

Loom is now supported by ScummVM, a program designed to let 2D adventure games run on multiple platforms. With ScummVM, Loom now runs on modern versions of windows, as well as Linux, Mac OS X, and many consoles such as Dreamcast, Wii, PlayStation 2, and PlayStation Portable. For a complete list of platforms supported by ScummVM, see here.

During the first mission, Malcolm is captured by spiders. He says "Spiders! Why'd it have to be spiders?" and later "Spiders. I HATE SPIDERS!" Indiana Jones said the same thing, but about snakes rather than spiders, in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The spider scene also references the fact that sidekicks in the Indiana Jones films end up having creepy crawly creatures on them at some point during the adventure.

Later, in the first "Calendar of the Sun" mission with Indiana Jones, Indy actually says his lines from the films "Snakes! Why'd if have to be snakes?" and "I hate snakes!"

Shadowgate is an adventure game originally released on July 30, 1987 for Mac. It was ported later that year to Amiga and then to DOS in 1988. It was then ported to the NES in 1989 and to Windows in 1993.

Infinate Ventures released a port named "Shadowgate Classic" on Gameboy Color in 2000 and on mobile phones in 2005.

A high definition remake was announced by Zojoi (a company founded by former ICOM employees) in 2012. The remake was crowd funded through a successful Kickstarter campaign, and was released for PC and Mac on August 21, 2014. The Android and iOS versions of the Shadowgate remake are scheduled to be released some time in Fall 2014.